The present invention relates to a method for the optical signal output of operating parameters in an operating device with an LED light source which is controlled by said operating device and is formed by at least two LEDs, which are intended individually to emit light of different colors and together to emit white total light.
Where it is mentioned below that an LED is “intended” to emit light of one color, this is intended to mean that the LED can only produce light of this color.
In the sector of lighting engineering and building services engineering, more or more systems have been developed in recent years in which various types of light-emitting means operating devices can be connected to one another via a bus system. One example of such a standardized bus system is the industry standard DALI.
When installing or modifying such a bus system, it is generally necessary to allocate an operating address to a newly added subscriber. This operating address can differ from an address of origin, possibly provided by the manufacturer, in the device.
It is known that the bus subscribers allocate the addresses themselves, for example on a random basis, from among a defined stock of addresses, triggered by a corresponding command from a bus control center. Since the bus address allocation to the bus subscribers is not the central focus of the present invention, reference is made to the relevant known methods.
In any case, an operating address will be assigned to each bus subscriber after completion of the method or each bus subscriber itself will have allocated itself an address from the defined stock of addresses. In order to be able to now proceed in targeted fashion with the following actual operation of the lighting installation controlled by means of the bus system, it is necessary to find out the operating address of each connected bus subscriber.
This requires a considerable amount of time since an operator needs to physically go up to each connected bus subscriber in order then to check the address allocation, usually visually, in situ. This installation step is naturally particularly laborious when the bus subscribers are distributed far apart in a building or possibly over several buildings. This is precisely the case with so-called emergency lighting devices, which are therefore intended to ensure defined emergency lighting, fed by a battery, in the event of failure of a system voltage supply and are generally distributed particularly far apart from one another over buildings. If, therefore, in particular in the case of emergency lighting devices, the fitter needs to move over wide areas of the installation area, at least finding the allocated addresses should then take place as quickly as possible.
WO 2006/136236 proceeds from this point and proposes providing additional optical and/or acoustic signal transducers which can reproduce the bus address in coded form, in addition to the light source controlled by the operating device. By way of example, LEDs which are preferably connected to the operating device can be used as acoustic signal transducers.
The present invention is intended to open up the possibility of reducing the hardware complexity involved in comparison with the most recently described prior art.